about war. Hardy’s notebooks are full of French and German poets, as
well as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; de la Mare wanted his poems to be
English haiku, and Edward Thomas announced his newly found poetic
vocation to its chief encourager, the American Robert Frost, in a quota-
tion from Verlaine’s ‘L’Art poe ́tique’: ‘I want to wring the necks [sic] of all
my rhetoric’.^28
Rather than separate them off into anex post factoEnglish tradition,
then, this study will place Owen, Thomas or Hardy back into the same
context as their modernist counterparts, the historical situation of the first
decades of the twentieth century and their literary-critical inheritance of
post-Romantic aesthetics. To write about any kind of non-modernist
poetics, though, equally means to register the incontrovertible power of
modernism; this book is not an argument with modernist poetry (there is
no arguing withThe Waste Landor ‘Mauberley’) but with some of the
justifications used for it, the principles of self-defining integrity which
kept the poetry wars running. By returning the modernist debate about
prosody in turn to the original Romantic debate about the limits of power
and freedom, however, this book also provides a reading of poetic form
opposed to the isolation of formalism. My argument throughout is that a
poem’s formal structure, its way of spacing time and sound, is inseparable
from its connections to history and agency, although it is not reducible to
them. Bourdieu has characterised formalism as a forgetting of ‘the histor-
ical process through which the social conditions of freedom from “exter-
nal determinations” get established’: by taking some time to trace the
origins of the idea of prosody and autonomy back to its sources in
Coleridge and the German Romantics, my aim is to show how ‘external
determination’ is exactly the argument about form itself in modern and
modernist poetics in the first place.^29 Seen historically, in other words, the
debate about poetry’s autonomy is not only cast in terms of its social
responsibilities, but equally in terms of its formal structures, and the fact
that the principle covers both makes prosody an inescapable part of
post-Romantic poetry’s historical and social relations. This perspective
makes prosody opposed equally to aesthetic ideology and the recent
anathemas against it, which have left critics with no option other than
to treat poetry as ideal historical data, promptly reinstating the aestheticist
split of form and context in reverse. For in a curious way, the critic who
treats poetry without thinking about its form in the name of resisting
the anti-contextual, anti-historical seductions of aesthetic ‘freedom’ is, in
fact, recapitulating the situation of the later Romantic Idealists who
valued it for just that reason. Romanticism initially celebrated poetry as
12 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism